Kerr frames her colorful narrative of her scientific objectives with autobiographical details of her own thrill-seeking...
The author’s quest to understand the psychology of thrill-seeking and fear.
Kerr, who holds a doctorate in sociology, seeks to explain how courting extreme experiences that challenge our fears can lead to a happier life. Her focus is not on the use of fear as a marketing device to “sell products and shape political debate” but on what fear triggers within us. Ordinarily bottled-up emotions are released, followed by an exuberant sense of exhilaration. Over the years, in her search for thrills and chills, Kerr has visited “the world's scariest haunted houses,” ridden on “its steepest roller coasters,” dangled “suspended by a cable, from one of the tallest human made structures,” experienced solitary confinement, and more. Her many adventures began with a haunted house experience at age 6 and continued with roller coasters during her adolescence. She reports how flirting with danger by challenging her body's adaptation to gravity on a two-minute roller-coaster ride evoked a cathartic state of high arousal, accompanied by screams and tears and followed by a daylong feeling of euphoria. Kerr's scientific interest was aroused years ago when she first visited ScareHouse, “a haunted attraction in Pittsburgh.” At the time, she was writing her dissertation and working on a project concerning health care. She began moonlighting at ScareHouse, analyzing customer surveys on how they rated their experiences. This led to her taking an active role in designing immersive experiences using actors who interact with visitors. Since 2014, she has been engaged in a formal collaboration with cognitive neuroscientist Greg Siegle to study the responses of the brain and body to fear. One of the tests involves brain scans that are administered to volunteers who are given tasks for them to perform before and after they visit the exhibits. As the author notes in this enjoyable account, “being scared significantly [makes] people feel better.”
Kerr frames her colorful narrative of her scientific objectives with autobiographical details of her own thrill-seeking experiences.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61039-482-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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